Portal Composites
Traditional portal server platforms (JSR 168 Portlets, etc.) and the new breed of enterprise mashup technologies are now providing twin ways of aggregating enterprise information and creating portal composite applications. Mashups (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-mashups.html) concentrate more on rapid and mind-blowing easy integration of multiple sources of information supplying data in multiple formats (RSS, JSON, ATOM, etc.). The sources could also be web services. For example, Yahoo pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) provides you with easy-to-use building blocks which allows you to manipulate and filter data feeds from different sites by sequencing these blocks appropriately. It took me 30 minutes to learn what actually are Yahoo Pipes and build a simple Yahoo Pipe for retrieving RSS feeds from Sun’s SDN website with an upper limit on the number of entries (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=zGLDfJq93BGWZBrjw5tC8g). Enterprise mashups would be aggregating information from existing enterprise applications and hence the security features need to be more robust.
However, besides content aggregation, the composite enterprise portal applications also enable one to perform business transactions accessing services from multiple enterprise applications from a single window using single sign on. This is where perhaps the non-mashup style enterprise portal might still have an edge. Modern portal platforms also enable workflows capabilities by integrating the portal server capabilities with the workflow task management and business process execution capabilities such as the SAW in Sun JCAPS (https://saw.dev.java.net/docs/SAW-UserGuide.html). Besides, the traditional enterprise portal platforms provide enterprise capabilities such as security, reliability, etc. Hence, while on the content aggregation front the line between the traditional portal technologies such as JSR-168 portlets (http://developers.sun.com/portalserver/reference/techart/jsr168/), IBM Lotus http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/tutorials/notes8-comp-apps/lz-dw-lz-notes8-comp-apps.html and mashups are slowly getting blurred, on the business transaction and enterprise capability front the traditional portal technologies might still have an edge. But again it may be a matter of time…
